like a wineskin in the smoke
Psalm 119 is beautiful.The Matthew Henry commentary describes it so, "This is a psalm by itself, like none of the rest; it excels them all, and shines brightest in this constellation. It is much longer than any of them more than twice as long as any of them. it is not making long prayers that Christ censures, but making them for a pretence, which intimates that they are in themselves good and commendable. It seems to me to be a collection of David's pious and devout ejaculations, the short and sudden breathings and elevations of his soul to God, which he wrote down as they occurred, and, towards the latter end of his time, gathered out of his daybook where they lay scattered, added to them many like words, and digested them into this psalm, in which there is seldom any coherence between the verses, but, like Solomon's proverbs, it is a chest of gold rings, not a chain of gold links."
I don't know why its beauty only struck me last night, but I think it has something to do with the power of this verse.
"Though I am like a wineskin in the smoke, I do not forget your decrees." Psalm 119:83I didn't know what a wineskin in the smoke really was, no clue as to its significance, only that it seemed to capture what I'm feeling like right now. A wineskin in the smoke. So anyway, this morning I decided to find out, again from Matthew Henry commentary-
"David begs God would make haste to comfort him. Lord, make haste to help me, for I have become like a bottle in the smoke, a leathern bottle, which if it hung any while in the smoke, was not only blackened with soot, but dried, and parched, and shrivelled up. David was thus wasted by age, and sickness, and sorrow. "
Not really something I can identify with, though aging I'm still young, still healthy, not sorrowful. But the later lines leapt out at me. "A bottle, when it is thus wrinkled with smoke, is thrown by, and there is no more use of it. Who will put wine into such old bottles? Thus was David, in his low estate, looked upon as a despised broken vessel, and as a vessel in which there was no pleasure."
My affliction is hardly as great but perhaps what's struck me is something like that described in this line, "Good men, when they are drooping and melancholy, sometimes think themselves more slighted than really they are". Sigh. Still David never cooled in his affection to the word of God, never let His precepts, His statues slip his mind. I shall endeavour to do the same, praying that this empty vessel may be filled again.
Lord, let me set my heart and mind on things above whatever my outward condition.
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